In the field of oil and gas production, the hydrocarbon reservoir is exploited when one or more well bores are drilled into the reservoir and liquid hydrocarbons (e.g. oil and gas) are extracted from the reservoir through the well bores. In this event, the well bore is generally referred to as a producing well bore or a producer. A fluid, typically water, is introduced into the reservoir at one or more points away from the producers to displace liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons, which causes them to be expelled from the reservoir through the producers. The point at which water is introduced into the reservoir is generally referred to as an injector.
The expulsion of liquid and/or gaseous hydrocarbons at the producers and the injection of water at the injectors establish a fluid flow pattern in the reservoir, which may be influenced by gravity. The fluid flow within the reservoir may be modeled as a function of time in order to predict how the production of liquid and/or gaseous hydrocarbons from a particular producer will vary over the lifetime of the reservoir.
A mathematical model of the fluid flow in a given reservoir may be constructed by techniques well known in the art. These techniques, however, are not exact and may be implemented using other numerical techniques to arrive at an estimated solution such as, for example, streamline techniques and finite difference techniques. These techniques, and their drawbacks, are more particularly described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,164,990, which is incorporated herein by reference.
The '990 patent generally relates to a method for determining fluid flow and processing fluid flow data related to a hydrocarbon reservoir using a streamline simulator and a finite difference simulator. The '990 patent describes a method for determining fluid flow in a volume containing two or more fluid components, which comprises determining one or more streamlines from a pressure field and solving for the fluid composition along each streamline. The method also includes solving for the pressure along each streamline and suggests using a finite difference technique for solving the fluid composition and/or pressure along each streamline. The '990 patent includes a flow chart (FIG. 2) illustrating a conventional streamline technique and computes the streamlines from the pressure field. The '990 patent, however, does not teach or suggest a system or method for using finite difference reservoir simulation results for computing the streamlines. Moreover, the '990 patent fails to teach or suggest streamline techniques, which include the use of streamline trajectories, to analyze the finite difference flow simulation results.
There is therefore, a need for streamline techniques that may be performed using streamline computations without the need for conventional streamline simulation. There is also a need for streamline techniques that include the use of streamline trajectories to analyze finite difference flow simulation results. Finally, there is a need for computing streamlines using finite difference flow simulation results.